Wall of Shame, post #2

I would like to take a moment to call everyone's attention to rule #10, which is:

10. A fic that has been rejected may be resubmitted once the appropriate changes have been made. Resubmitting a fic without significant changes is a waste of your time and ours, and we reserve the right to be irritated. If a fic is resubmitted with minutes or hours of rejection, so that it's totally obvious to us that you didn't bother making any changes, it'll be deleted without any further notice.


Several of you appear to have missed seeing it, as you are reuploading your fics without making any changes. Don't do this. It makes your site mummy really, really unhappy.

Yet more about the Cabal

All of the submitted questionnaires are now before the Cabal at large for voting on, with the identifying information stripped off. As a couple of our members are traveling, it'll probably be until the end of the week before we can reach a final decision, at which time I'll be emailing people directly, so this should be the last announcement on the subject, thank goodness.

More about Cabal-ing

Okay, I got few responses to my first email, so I don't know if it's the thought of applying that was intimidating or that sending it to bunches of people at once made my emails get filtered out as spam. So, let's try this: Anyone who was interested in applying to the Cabal can download the Word document with the full text about what to do to apply, and then hopefully that will work.


Right-click here and choose "Save file as...", then follow instructions and email me when you're done.

Update

I sent an email to everyone who expressed interest in joining the Cabal - if you didn't get it, let me know so I can resend it. If you meant to express interest but haven't yet, do so in a considerable hurry.



And don't forget to go see Anise if you're going to Lumos! See below for details.

Two things

First, we're looking once again for new Cabal members. It's a commitment of one day per week, and requires a thorough grounding in the rules of grammar. If interested, send an email with "Cabal" somewhere in the subject line to mynuet at gmail dot com.



The other thing is that one of our very own beloved Cabal members and D/G authors, Anise, is going to be presenting at Lumos at the end of this month! Anyone who's attending should go to her two presentations, which are:
1, The Many Loves of Harry Potter: A New Key to Their Mysteries," Friday, July 29, from 4:00-4:50 pm in Meeting Room Marquis 5.
2, Love Potions: Saturday, July 30, Marquis 2&3 from 1:30-2:10.


Seriously, some of you should go because you're D/G shippers and want to support one of our own, some of you should go because you're H/G shippers and want to show that not all the people on your ship are the kind of intolerant person who would try to cause trouble just because someone is daring to suggest that there exist potential romantic interests for Harry other than Ginny, but most of you should go because Anise is carefully neutral in her thorough and scholarly approach to exploring the canon in minute detail. Even if you don't agree with her conclusions, it's always fascinating to hear her theories and the depth to which she's read the books in order to support them. In short, it will be an interesting lecture which will help your own understanding of canon and writing of fanfic, so go if you possibly can!


PS If anyone goes wearing D/G t-shirts (available here or here), please take pictures and send them to me, so I can squee. :D

Yay!

The mail system mostly seems to be working now. Keep in mind, though, those of you who use hotmail, that hotmail does not play nice with others and routinely routes all mail from this site to the junk mail folder. Find out how to set cabal at d&g.com as someone who can send mail to you or switch to a different mail program - I highly recommend gmail, and will hand out invites like candy if it means less people complaining about how they never get mail from us.

Augh!

My apologies - I knew that our mail system had broken, but it somehow didn't sink in that this meant that new users weren't receiving their passwords, and that no one could contact me through the site to ask about it. *hangs head in shame*


I just set the site to allow you to make your own password when you sign up, and we're still working on trying to figure out why the mail system is kaput. In the meantime, should you need any help, please contact me through mynuet [at] gmail [dot] com.


P.S. If you're writing because you never got your password, please include your username so that I can set it for you manually.

Betas

Some of y'all think you're slick, and so instead of finding a beta, you keep resubmitting your fics until someone on the Cabal is chump enough to do a beta for you. You know who you are, but I'm not going to name you by name because you would promptly be stoned to death by all the other authors on the site, who will now be rejected for piddly mistakes instead of having the Cabal member fix it. You see, as of now and until further notice, I've forbidden the Cabal from doing beta work for any of the submissions on the site. Why? Because if you as an author can't be bothered with making your fic grammatically correct, we can't be bothered to archive it.



Yes, I realize this sounds harsh. Feel free to start your own archive(s) if you don't like it.

Contest

Hey, some news that doesn't involve real life dropping on your site mommies like a ton of bricks and thus delaying your fic gratification! Will wonders never cease?



One of our Cabal members, and a beloved D/G author, is sponsoring a fic contest! First prize is Draco's wand, and I will mightily resist the urge to make any comments about that, because we try to keep the public areas here down to a G rating. So go, join, write, and then have fun reading the fics that result! Here's all the details on how and what and where.

Sorry about the delay.

Greetings All!
First of all, I want to appologize about the delay. A couple of things have occurred to slow it down. Mainly, somehow in the switch over to the new site my password got mangled and I couldn't log in to save my life. Coupling that with the fact that I just got a new computer and for some reason iMail won't connect to any of my email accounts ... and you get the main reason I haven't been around to finish up. I couldn't Log in! I ended up having to go in the back end and edit everything though the database directly as opposed to using the site it's self. Plus, the initial update I did took me longer than I expected and that meant that the free time I had set aside for this got eaten up pretty quickly and then ran out, as I came up to my busiest week I've had in, probably, my entire life. I'm pretty close to done with all the updates I was working on.


However, Mynuet is currently having some things in Real Life which have prevented her from being within five feet of a computer for the last several weeks. I had wanted to double check all the changes I'd made and see if there was anything else she wanted done before I opened the archive back up.


Plus, I sort of needed her to reset my password for me. ;)


However, as long as everyone understands that there still may be issues and bugs and things still might randomly break, I'll go ahead and open the site back up. I haven't gotten to test quite as much as I wanted to, and there were specific bugs that Shar had me working on. With out her input, and my being unable to log into the site, I'm not sure that they're all fixed.


There is a reason I do the code and don't write, as I'm sure you can see in this post. The long and short of what I'm saying is that I'm opening us back up, but please understand that things might still be less than a hundred percent around here.

Good news! (and some inconvenience)

Well, it turns out that Megh unexpectedly managed to carve out some time in her schedule in order to work on the site! There's a software upgrade that we hope will fix the long list of bugs that have bothered us, including the various review difficulties and the mysterious unopenable categories. Megh is going to back up the site in case of glitches, then work on getting the software updated and the bugs ironed out. YAY!



The downside, because there really is no such thing as a free lunch, is that the site has to stop receiving new submissions while Megh is tinkering with the site, because the one time I didn't shut everything down while messing with the site, I got bitched at because an author's story went kerblooey. Since I don't like being bitched at, and I also don't like fics going kerblooey, we're closing as of right now, and will reopen as soon as Megh has everything finished. Current ETA of reopening is a week from now, but this estimate may change one way or another, depending on how things go. Probably your first indication will be when there's a news item here from Megh saying, "Yay, it's finished, tell me if it's still broken."



Our apologies for the lack of notice, but we thought it would be better to go ahead and get the work on the site done while the time was available. Thank you in advance for your patience, and we hope you come back and see the new and improved site next week. :)

Emails

Hotmail has a habit of routing mail from us into the junk mail folder. This will affect you receiving your password, the emails which either accept or reject your fics, review alerts, and author/story alerts, so you may want to try to fix that. If you use hotmail, please look into adding cabal at dracoandginny com to your trusted senders list, which should solve the problem. Or you could look into another mail program, but let's not go too crazy, right?

Actual site news...

Okay, just so y'all know, I'm heading into finals and so absolutely nothing is going to be done about the site until after May 9th. Once I'm done with school for the semester, I'll be going over the site to see what I can do to help Megh figure out how to fix some of the problems. I know at the very least there's an update to the site software available, but before I make even the slightest attempt to do something technical, I'd want the entire site backed up. I shudder to think what might happen if a rank novice like me starts mucking around with stuff.

So anyway, that's where things stand. I apologize for the delay in fixing the site's problems, but we will get to them as soon as we can.


Oooh, idea. One of the problems is that we only have one skin, which obscures the author's note box for some reason. If any of you want to try your hand at making a skin, that'd be groovy, but don't get us sued or piss anyone off by using their art without permission, and keep it G rated. I prefer if people have to actively seek out teh pr0n. If you do make a skin, drop me a line at mynuet [at] gmail [dot] com. :D

Wall of Shame

Thus far in the course of running this archive, for about two years now, I have resisted the urge towards publishing some of the more egregious submission sins, because I wanted to minimize my own reputation as a dragon lady, and because I wanted to make sure to spare the feelings of those who might have made an honest mistake. Thus, the girl who assured me, despite a host of mistakes including a character renamed to Blase Zambini, that she couldn't possibly need a beta reader because she beta read for others? Did not get mentioned here by name. Neither did the plagiarists, nor the person who submitted a Draco/Hermione story, nor even the few people I have had to ban.



This forbearance ends here, because if I ever have to see something like the following ever again, I will have someone shot.



This vile excrescence was rejected this evening:

"ok so i know these stories are suppose to be about Draco and ginny but i wrote this a long time ago and it has a different girl in it. Sorry. I needed the reviews on who likes it. It's quit good actually if you read it.
summary: Draco and Allie have known each other since thye were five. Thye spent every minute of there life together and even more. Well Allie gets sent away for two years leaving Draco behind at the mercy of his father. When she comes back Draco is a little apprehinsize on wheter she will be the same or if her father had taken her. She is also thinking the same afriad to face a new draco if there is one..."




Note that apparently having our title, our banner, our submission rules, and our bloody URL all spell out that this site is for D/G was insufficient to get the point across that we expect stories to be D/G, but apparently this girl thought that saying "sorry" was sufficient for us to overlook that, because she was being so gracious as to post here due to needing reviews. Well, miss, here is a review for you: learn to spell, learn to capitalize, learn to punctuate, and learn to read and follow directions. Then, if you're so inclined as to write a D/G fic, you might get a response other than rejection. For now, though, be warned that the next person to submit something that so completely and blatantly breaks the rules will be approved - with added editorial commentary from the Cabal, because if we have to put up with this sort of thing, we might as well get to blow off steam.



The rest of you, the ones who just make honest mistakes, are fine. Continue to spell check and look for betas and read the rules, and we'll understand if you make small slips. It's only people who are as blatantly arrogant and disdainful of our rather simple rules that are subject to my rather wordy wrath.

Midterms are totally an apocalypse.

I just barely survived midterms, and I'm waiting to hear if Megh made it through. We haven't deserted the site, but it's been a rough month. Just to let y'all know in advance, this will happen again during finals. Anyway, in the meantime, if there's something we need to know, shoot an email. If you don't hear back from me within two days, shoot me another one, as I either didn't get it or meant to reply but lost it in my inbox.

Um, yeah.

Normally around this time there's a "top fics of the past month" post, but the statistics for the new host are different and I haven't figured out how to get them do what I want yet. I'll work on it.

In better news, there's now a mug and t-shirts on our Cafepress store with the Photobooth banner. Again, no profit is being made.

Okay... So....

Review counts are still wrong. I need to do some research on that.

Also, there is an issue with the categories pages, which I need to research. Sorry for all the bumps y'all. I'm trying to work on it.

Also the DGArchive Layout did get taken down temporarily. While tweaking it I broke it and figured it was easier for everyone to use Photobooth until the others are fixed.

Review Count Bug

I uploaded the patch for the review count bug. If anyone still has bugs, let me know.

Megh is our hero!

Two things. First, you may've noticed that we have a new skin available, "Photobooth". Megh made it from art that Starlette made just for us. If you'd like to check out some more of Starlette's fabulous art, check out her website. If you'd like to use a Livejournal icon based on the artwork, go here, and remember to a) leave a comment, and b) give credit. Much, much love and kisses for Starlette, Brendan, and Megh.

Also! If you use Livejournal and would like to know all about what fics are updated each day, you can go HERE and sign up for the syndicated feed to show up on your friendspage, or simply visit the community to rifle through what's been updated lately. Again, much worship of the hard-working Megh for putting that together so all of us can benefit.

Various Things

Due to the fact that a whole crop of issues with formatting have grown out of the new text editor included with the new version of efiction, I have turned it off.
Prior to this new editor we didn't have issues with center, and other such simple html formatting code.


I hope this will solve the issue. Thanks for your understanding.

Buy shwag!

Believe it or not, there have been those who asked about FIA t-shirts, and so I went to CafePress and made some. No one (except Cafepress) is making any money off of these, but if you want a t-shirt with our purty banner on it, go visit our CafePress store. There's also a mug on there, because I want a mug for my very own. :D

Outages

So, since we've moved, the new host that we use has been subject to at least two DDOS attacks that I know of, resulting in outages that last for a few hours.  What they had to say about it was:

We want to assure you that we are doing everything we can to prevent these attacks and they are being treated with the highest priority.  We have also implemented mazu to prevent 99% of them and also firewalls and filters.

Quite frankly, at this point, I'm not sure there's anything I can do.  We could move back to Globat, except they also had random outages and they were slower.  If I had millions of dollars I could move to a different hosting service or just have our own dedicated server, but I don't have millions of dollars - at the moment, I don't even have tens of dollars.  And, quite frankly, the thought of switching servers again makes me want to weep.

Therefore, the only thing I can do about the outages at the moment is ask that you have patience, and to please not get hostile and/or panicked if the site is not up.  Wait a few hours; it will come back.  Email me if you think it's been down an excessive length of time, but understand that I'm away from my computer for nine hours a day for classes and six or more for sleep, and so it's likely that by the time I get your message, the site will be back up.  My email is mynuet (not terribly hard to remember, I don't think) at gmail. com, since you can't contact me through the site if the site is down. 

Also, if you feel any need whatsoever to complain, please make sure it is to me, and directly.  No one else needs to deal with the aggravation, and if you're just going to a LJ community or a mailing list to do it, I may or may not see it.

Some snafus

It has come to my attention that the editor that came along with the upgrade is causing some issues with formatting.  Apparently there are times when it adds or removes line breaks, and when spaces between words disappear, and sometimes the html tags don't get translated to html.  I'm not sure at this point what's causing the issues, and I'm not sure when they can be fixed, as our Tech Goddess works full time and I start school again this week.  For now, I recommend using the preview function and having patience - it will get fixed just as soon as we can manage.  

Edit by Megh: After doing some research on efictions support site, I've found a couple of things that can be causing the errors.

1. The normal word drama. Word inserts odd code all over the place. Other archives have had problems with line spacing as well, but find that by ensuring that there is absolutely no word generated code in the document they cease to have the problem.
2. The editors code stripping. The site strips everything except accepted code. We enter which html tags are allowed in the sites setting control panel. If you are, for instance, using b instead of strong for your code to emphasize something, you can run into errors. I've updated our allowed tags to include both the codes I know of for bolidng, underlines, and italics.

The main problem with these errors is that once the stories are updated on the site they have already been run through the tag stripper. So, you must edit the text in order to fix them. I'm sorry for the inconvienence, and I'm working on finding another solution for this.

Some useful information

Just FYI, some handy things to know with the new upgrade...

If you go to 'account info' and then 'edit personal information', you can:

1. Enter your IM info for people to contact you
2. Mark whether you are willing to beta read for people
3. Check the box for getting author/story alerts.

See, if you read a story, you'll see a box near the bottom that says 'options', and among those options are adding the author or the story to your favorites. Well, if you do that, and you click the appropriate tickybox in your account, as stated above, you'll get alerts.

E-mail alerts will be sent out:

- For a favorite story when a new chapter is added.
- For a favorite author when a new story is added. Only a new story. New chapters to existing stories don't trigger the alert.

 

AAAAaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand, if you click on 'authors', you can set it to give you all the names of people who have volunteered to be beta readers. Handy, no? BE POLITE if you ask one of them to help you. POLITENESS IS NECESSARY.

Also, sometime in the New Year, I think I'll have a challenge and/or a contest. Suggestions for challenges or prizes would be most welcome. I also want to think about doing a contest for who can review the most. More on this as I think of it.

Skins

Through out the day you may see new skins randomly added and then removed from the skin options. This is due to the fact that I'm attempting to convert our skins over, and create some new ones.

Please be understanding. We decided to open the site prior to being ready out of the kindness of our hearts.

The current skins available will probably go away once we get everything all set up. They're here so that the content is at least viewable.

As always, thanks for your understanding.